Google is rolling out Similar Audiences for Search and Shopping campaigns in AdWords. On Monday, May 1st, Google said:

“Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) help you reconnect with people who’ve been to your website before, but engaging both new and loyal customers is just as important to your business. Starting today, we’re rolling out similar audiences for Search and Shopping along with Customer Match for Shopping to help you use your own data to reach the right customer with the right message.” – Google Blog

Similar audiences will give advertisers the ability to target customers based on whether or not they’ve searched for the same things as previous site visitors. Not completely surprising but slightly mind-blowing, right? We’ve been using this for our clients for the past year and a half in a beta test and have found significant increases in CTR.

”Imagine you’re marketing a hotel in Hawaii using RLSA, and you want to connect with summer travelers. The people in your “Recent Converters” list might be searching for things like ‘flights to Maui,’ ‘scuba classes,’ and ‘flip-flop sandals.’ Powered by Google’s machine learning, similar audiences uses these search trends to help you find people who are looking for the same things as your existing customers, even if they’re not on your remarketing lists.”

Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) featuring similar audiences are then created and automatically updated in your campaign. Remarketing lists are eligible for expansion through similar audiences when certain requirements are met. These include having at least 1000 cookies, and enough recent visitors with similar search histories. These lists have already rolled out for a handful of companies in beta to test out the software and it’s working. According to Google’s blog, John Deere had a 300% increase in clickthrough rate and a 31% increase in conversion volume. It works so well for display, I don’t see how it wouldn’t work for search but will add updates as we implement these for our clients.

It works so well for display, and now we can we implement them across the board for our clients. Let us know how it goes for you. We’ll include similar audience lists strategy in our upcoming AdWords training. Check out Google’s Best Practices Guides in the meantime for optimizing your campaigns: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6154846 And as always, let us know if you have any questions!

Thanks to everyone who came to Demand Quest for our National Small Business Week 2017 free Google workshops and training to get you on the map! We had a great turnout and we shared a lot of important resources for small businesses to use in their digital marketing strategies. Here are some of our favorite local business resources from #NSBW #AllForSmallBiz: